LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Being locked behind heavy metal doors can seem like the end of the line.

“With a prison sentence, you feel like everything’s shut off to you,” said Tami Fuller, who is currently serving a sentence in Lincoln’s Community Correctional Center.

However, a new program aims to make sure those doors don’t stay shut forever.

Fuller is one of more than 200 Nebraska inmates involved in the Unlocking Potential With Academic Resources and Development, or UPWARD, program. About 30 Southeast Community College instructors teach courses between the Reception and Treatment Center, Nebraska State Penitentiary, Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, Community Correctional Center and the Center for People.

The program’s administrator, SCC’s Amy Doty, experienced incarceration, and she says it was education that made all the difference in her life.

“After incarceration, instead of just kind of being in the moment and I’m feeling kind of hopeless and thinking about all the barriers that I was going to face when I went home, I was able to focus on building skills and building knowledge and becoming a better critical thinker,” Doty said.

Participants earn college credits, and some say the good goes well beyond the instruction.

“I’ve had them use my only my first name, or call me a student, which is amazing,” Fuller said. “When you’re incarcerated, you learn, everybody says your last name, not your first. So it humanizes you again, it makes you back into a real person.”

Some inmates look to the education to start a new chapter in their lives, like Jessica Whittaker, who’s currently taking a class to get her CDL.

“I anticipate that I’ll be a truck driver,” Whittaker said. “Overall, I want to be financially stable and set myself up for success.”

Some inmates are even using the opportunity to give back, like Lawrence Garner, who’s taking a communications class and wants to give speeches at juvenile facilities when he gets out, steering them away from crime.

“A lot of these kids are coming from broken homes, one parent homes, and I’d just like to maybe share my experience,” Garner said. “I’d take one, just one. Save one.”

It’s not just the students who soak in lessons.

“I’ve learned a lot from my students,” Rebecca Bartlett, an SCC instructor, said. “I’ve learned so much about perseverance and determination. I have learned so much from them about hope.”

The UPWARD program is set to expand next fall, with SCC administrators angling to tap into federal dollars to help run it.

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